18 OUR USE OF THE LAND 



case of move or starve. They moved to new land and were 

 defeated again. So long as they refused to obey the laws of 

 nature, they were drifters. 



This flight from defeat at the hands of nature has become 

 an American tradition. As long as there was new land to which 

 people could flee, there was a safety valve for discontented 

 people on worn-out land. In places where men knew how to 

 play nature's game according to the rules, they have managed 

 to hold their land, if the man-made laws of economics did not 

 interfere. But where men did not understand nature's balance, 

 and where low returns and high costs caused men to exhaust 

 the resources of the land, the people are in retreat. 



Thus, because of a lack of understanding and because of 

 unbalanced economic laws, gullies are eating into the fertile 

 Piedmont, floods rush down the Mississippi Valley, arroyos 

 yawn on the Great Plains, dust storms choke western corn and 

 wheat farmers, cut-over forests create man-made deserts, aban 

 doned mine pits stare out blankly from the sides of the 

 mountains. 



Good use of the land, keeping nature's balance, requires 

 knowledge, skill, and patience. It would be folly to expect the 

 average farmer, burdened with making a living for his family, 

 to work out all the complicated methods of preventing soil 

 erosion, or keeping up the fertility of pasture and range lands, 

 or harvesting his timber in such a way that he always has a 

 healthy, vigorous, growing forest. In fact, it is only since the 

 turn of the century that the scientific experts have launched 

 large scale research of land problems and have spent any real 

 effort to make people aware of the waste of our land resources. 

 And it is only since the destruction of the land has reached such 

 tragic proportions that any adequate methods have been set in 

 motion to help landowners to help themselves. The old Agri 

 cultural Extension Service was created primarily to teach farm 

 ers how to grow bigger and better cash crops. It was only with 



